Using The Right Equipment For Your Pitch Shots (Video) - by Pete Styles
Using The Right Equipment For Your Pitch Shots (Video) - by Pete Styles

When we’re talking about using the right club for the right pitch shots, lot of people would consider well it’s a sand wedge or the pitching wedge. If you were a little bit more involved in your equipment you might talk about the degrees of loft. Is it a 60 degree wedge which is generally a lob wedge, 56 degree wedge generally is sand wedge, 50 to 52 degree wedge probably classed as a gap wedge or an approach wedge and then 46, 48 degree something like that would be a pitching wedge. So that’s the degrees of loft on the face and that’s generally going to change the height and the distance that the golf ball goes and therefore how quickly it stops on the green.

But if you’re struggling with fatting the golf ball, changing those wedges doesn’t really make a massive deal of difference. You would still probably fat the ball. But one of the things that we can change within a wedge to make sure that you’re fatting the ball less or it’s less severe is actually the bounce angle. So bounce angle is this consideration here that when we position the club down on a hard surface, the leading edge of the club is going to sit in the air by a number of degrees and if we can measure that number of degrees here, that would be classed as the bounce angle. So it’s the fact that the trailing edge is below, the leading edge is the number of degrees of bounce. Now you can get low bounce wedges with maybe 0 to 4 degrees bounce on the wedge. Mid-bounce would be sort of 6 to 10 and high degree of bounce would be around 12 to 14 degrees of bounce. Now what the bounce does is as you hit down into the surface, the bounce, the trailing edge is going to stop the club digging in. So if you have no bounce, the club would effectively look like a knife and just dig straight into the turf. Now if you’re hitting the ball fat and you’re using no bounce that club is going to get quite severely low down and almost stop before you hit the ball. If you have a bit more bounce that club will skid a bit more and if you have loads of bounce, 12 to 14 degrees of bounce, the hope is that even if the club hits the ground slightly before the ball that big sole play, that big degree of bounce on the bottom stops the club digging in, skids the club forwards and you actually still make good contact with the ball and fly the ball quite nicely even though you actually made a mistake and hit it fat. So if you’re struggling with fatting the golf ball, look at your wedges and get a high degree of bounce. Now see on the club the degrees of bounce well take it to a local pro shop and get a PGA professional to measure the degrees of bounce. But the more bounce you have the better you will be if you make a mistake and hit the ball fat. 2016-09-30

When we’re talking about using the right club for the right pitch shots, lot of people would consider well it’s a sand wedge or the pitching wedge. If you were a little bit more involved in your equipment you might talk about the degrees of loft. Is it a 60 degree wedge which is generally a lob wedge, 56 degree wedge generally is sand wedge, 50 to 52 degree wedge probably classed as a gap wedge or an approach wedge and then 46, 48 degree something like that would be a pitching wedge. So that’s the degrees of loft on the face and that’s generally going to change the height and the distance that the golf ball goes and therefore how quickly it stops on the green.

But if you’re struggling with fatting the golf ball, changing those wedges doesn’t really make a massive deal of difference. You would still probably fat the ball. But one of the things that we can change within a wedge to make sure that you’re fatting the ball less or it’s less severe is actually the bounce angle. So bounce angle is this consideration here that when we position the club down on a hard surface, the leading edge of the club is going to sit in the air by a number of degrees and if we can measure that number of degrees here, that would be classed as the bounce angle. So it’s the fact that the trailing edge is below, the leading edge is the number of degrees of bounce.

Now you can get low bounce wedges with maybe 0 to 4 degrees bounce on the wedge. Mid-bounce would be sort of 6 to 10 and high degree of bounce would be around 12 to 14 degrees of bounce. Now what the bounce does is as you hit down into the surface, the bounce, the trailing edge is going to stop the club digging in. So if you have no bounce, the club would effectively look like a knife and just dig straight into the turf. Now if you’re hitting the ball fat and you’re using no bounce that club is going to get quite severely low down and almost stop before you hit the ball. If you have a bit more bounce that club will skid a bit more and if you have loads of bounce, 12 to 14 degrees of bounce, the hope is that even if the club hits the ground slightly before the ball that big sole play, that big degree of bounce on the bottom stops the club digging in, skids the club forwards and you actually still make good contact with the ball and fly the ball quite nicely even though you actually made a mistake and hit it fat.

So if you’re struggling with fatting the golf ball, look at your wedges and get a high degree of bounce. Now see on the club the degrees of bounce well take it to a local pro shop and get a PGA professional to measure the degrees of bounce. But the more bounce you have the better you will be if you make a mistake and hit the ball fat.